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So 1 in 20 teachers and children are likely to respond sexually to child-beating in schools: what’s wrong with that?

We managed to get rid of this shit…

That may seem an obvious question, but it’s worth taking it seriously.

As we know from the Irish and Australian Commissions of Inquiry into child abuse in schools and other institutions, in very authoritarian schools the child-beating scenario too often leads to child rape.

Why would a ritual which includes removing some of the child’s clothing and always involves forcing the child to present his or her buttocks submissively lead to rape?

It’s because those teachers and other officials experienced it as sexual: beating the child turned them on, and the “corporal punishment” rules put them in a position of enormous power over the child.

One in 20 teachers, assuming that teachers are the same as the rest of us, is sexually attracted to bdsm, and turned on by bdsm situations. This is true whether or not the teacher is aware of their sexual response, and is doing his or her best to suppress it.

Mostly, the one in 20 teachers who interpret and respond to school “spankings” sexually don’t actually rape the child.

Well, it’s always a compulsory sexual act forced on a child by an adult who is likely to find the scenario arousing, even if they try not to. It’s just not rape if you define rape as involving penetration.

It’s still … extremely undesirable.

It’s odd that many parents who would be fearful and irate if a gay sports teacher gave their son a back massage seem to take genuine mistreatment of their children with complete calm.

Awakenings

When Charles Moser studied a California-based bdsm community he found that about 5% of people currently engaged in the bdsm community had had their interest in bdsm awakened by a physical punishment received in childhood.

That may lead some people to conclude that child-beating is not okay because it increases the number of “perverts” undermining society and having weird street parties. But that’s not my point at all. First, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being into bdsm. Second, those children will, if they’re not beaten in schools or at home, almost certainly become aware of their sexual interest in some other way.

The real problem is that it’s psychologically harmful for children to be forced to discover an important part of their sexuality, when they’re too young to assimilate it, in a non-consensual setting of guilt, pain and fear.

We all believe that children should not have sexual experiences forced on them by an adult. Sex is something they should discover for themselves, in their own time, as they become able to handle it. It’s time to put that belief into practice, and put an end to child-beating.

In the meantime, in the immortal words of Roger Waters, “Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone!”

Note

This is the end of a series. The earlier posts, including the statistics behind the conclusion that about 1 in 20 people respond to bdsm scenarios, sets and settings, can be found here:

There are good non-bdsm reasons for not hitting children. We know that it doesn’t work, that it makes kids more violent, and that there that there are other, more effective ways of disciplining children. That should be enough to end the practice, right there.

But we also know that it operates in a racist way: that children from ethnic minorities are the most likely to be beaten in schools. We also know something that may be marginally more horrific, which is that children with a disability are the most likely to be beaten.

In short, it’s cruel, it’s deliberately degrading, it doesn’t work, and (despite my respect for the teaching profession as a whole) the schools that allow “corporal punishment” have amply demonstrated that they are incapable in implementing it “fairly”, that is, without racism or bias against people with a disability.

It needs to be outlawed. Now.

The bdsm-related case against beating children

The bdsm case against child beating is that ritualised beating, especially on the buttocks, is sexual. Forcing sex acts on a child is sexual abuse. “Corporal punishment” is child-molesting.

Vile book, by vile people, advocates child-beating (also punishment starvings). It is implicated in the deaths of three children.

People who argue against this usually make two claims. The first claim is that school and parental beatings are different from sexual beatings. Because they hurt too much to be sexual.

All they’re saying is that they don’t know anything at all about sexual spankings. Sexual spankings can be delivered using a paddle or cane, and be far harder than anything that could legally be inflicted in a school.

Doms soon learn that some submissives can have an amazing ability to take and eroticise pain. In my own experience as a dom, the upper limit can be my own squeamishness, and not the submissive’s desires and response. There is no identifiable point at which a spanking is “too hard to be sexual”.

People who say, “Beat children hard and then they won’t be turned on,” are revealing some ugly things about themselves. One of those things is that they don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.

The other claim is that beating is only sexual for a tiny minority of the population, as if it’s okay if it’s a sexual act in a few cases, because it’s worth it for all the yummy pain, fear and humiliation it inflicts on children.

But their belief, or at least claim, that only a tiny minority of the population is likely to interpret a beating sexually is wrong. That’s a matter of established fact.

About 10% of child-beatings at school are likely to be sexually charged for at least one of the participants, the punisher or the beaten child. So, of the approximate 326,400 child-beatings in US schools, each year, about 32,600 involve an adult or a child who is directly aware, from their own reaction, that this is a sexually charged act.

Tomorrow we’re going to explore a question whose answer seems comically obvious. But it is worth thinking about it: So a significant proportion of both teachers and children are responding sexually to child-beatings in schools: what’s wrong with that?

Jennifer couldn’t believe that she’d thanked me for spanking her, but her words still hung in the air. Her face blushed as furiously as her bottom. She squirmed, and her little skirt rode up to the tops of her thighs, exposing that white-cotton gusset between.

Jennifer’s squirming was … hypnotic

She’d have to stand up to pull the skirt down, and she knew she didn’t have permission. She couldn’t imagine asking for permission. So she could only blush, sometimes looking down and sometimes staring, uncertainly, into my eyes.

I smiled at her. “That’s better. The thing is, Jennifer, you’re a good girl. Really.”

I looked at her. Jennifer was still blushing furiously and trying hard to keep still. But she nodded. She was a good girl.

“Now, you get very good marks, Jennifer.” She squirmed again, her little pussy again flashing whitely between plump thighs. It was the word “marks” that had set her off. I said, “You have a very good record. Your marks, yes, your marks, are very good. You’ve won awards, and you take part in extra-curricular activities. It’s quite clear that achievement is important to you. Isn’t it?”

Jennifer closed her knees tightly. “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Now, you’ve got a clean slate as far as I’m concerned. You did wrong, you took your punishment bravely. And now there’s nothing on your record. What do you say?”

“Ummm… Thank you, sir.”

Mr fucking Scary, that’s who

“Good girl. Though if you’re late again, I’ll cane you. That’s fair warning. But you, Jennifer, you may be thinking that one spanking isn’t enough to make things right. Not in your own mind.”

I looked at her. Her hands were white. Her thighs trembled, knees slightly apart. It was as though I was looking at her half-naked again. I laid down a card. “In fact, you might prefer to go above and beyond to impress me that you really are well behaved. Wouldn’t you?”

She frowned. I was right, but she hadn’t expected this. “Yes, uh, yes, sir.”

“But you might be at a loss as to how to do so.”

Jennifer watched me, fascinated. Then she nodded, and looked at my carpet again. She’d seen a lot of it, in the last half-hour.

Does child-beating in schools “cause” people do become involved in bdsm as adults?

In one sense the answer is “yes”.

Charles Moser’s research on a bdsm community in California found that about 5% of the community members had became aware of their sexual interest through a childhood spanking. About one in 20 (that ratio keeps coming up in this context!) bdsm participants were launched on their bdsm career by being spanked by an adult, when they were a child.

Disciplinary conditions at the Shelbyville Baptist School were strict because … Jesus.

Although that’s a minority of bdsm participants, and it’s not the only experience that makes people aware of their response to bdsm, that means it’s still common for adult participants in bdsm to have had their first bdsm sexual experience, which they remember as a sexual experience, while being beaten as a child.

So how many people are we talking about?

If we apply Moser’s finding to the 16,000,000 people who take part in bdsm or sexual spanking in the United States alone, that comes to 800,000 Americans.

Given the strong advocacy for child-beating from the US Chrstian right, which hates everything they consider to be “perversion”, it’s ironic that so many people have the US Christian right to thank for their bdsm sexual awakening.

Bdsm “trigger events”

In another sense the answer is “probably not, exactly”.

That’s because some people have some genetic susceptibility to interest in bdsm, but they need a trigger event, something to show them bdsm and its erotic possibilities, before they develop that interest.

A similar process – genetic susceptibility plus a trigger event to bring out that genetic potential – applies in the development of phobias. I’m not comparing bdsm to phobias in any other sense, of course.

Child-beatings in schools are only one kind of event that can trigger an interest in bdsm, and particularly in sexual spankings. If you remove child-beating from the mix, there would still be plenty of other triggers that a bdsm-susceptible person will notice and respond to.

Potential bdsm triggers include passages in books, scenes in movies, in TV shows, in fashion shows, images on advertising billboards, and so on.

A hot night in Castle Anthrax. Spankee doctors Winston and Piglet

I know a woman who discovered her interest in submission during a screening of, of all things, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was the scene where a bunch of Glasgow girls dressed as novices (hah! I’ve been to Glasgow) demand to be spanked.

The woman was surprised to find she thought it was even sexier than it was funny. It stayed with her.

She kept on saying the punch line, “And … after the spanking, the oral sex!” at odd moments for years afterwards. Caught my attention, anyway.

The point is, the trigger event can be something that other people don’t see as sexual at all.

When “corporal punishment” is finally banned in all schools, and parents are educated about spanking’s sexual payload, bdsm won’t disappear or even shrink. People who have a propensity to notice and react erotically to bdsm triggers, including spankings, will mostly become bdsm-aware through some other stimulus instead.

But it’s better that people pick this sexual interest, bdsm, voluntarily in their own time, and not through a dangerous punishment ritual forced on them by an adult.

Jennifer had her side to me, hands hovering about the hems of her panties. She’d seen herself in the glass of my cabinet, and the glowing red of her bottom had embarrassed her. Confused, she turned to face me, panties still around her lower thighs. Her face flamed redder, once she’d forgot the warm ache in her bottom for long enough to realize the vision she was presenting me with.

I picked up the wooden chair I’d been sitting in while she was over my knee.

I put it back in the corner, and turned in time to glimpse that perfect little pouch, snugly cased in white cotton again, before her skirt dropped, cutting off that vision.

Like a curtain falling. The show really was over.

I sat in my office chair behind my desk and watched her.

She had her eyes on the floor while she fumbled her jacket back on. For a second she hesitated over the buttons. She was feeling naked, exposed. She thought better of it and dropped her hands to her sides. The silence lengthened. Eventually she looked up and met my gaze.

“Better,” I said. “Now. Have a seat.”

She was startled. She’d thought this was over and she’d be allowed to retreat. For some reason she raised her hands to her tousled hair, horrified about something, but she dropped them again.

She said down on the leather armchair I used for interviews with parents and, it seemed, just-been-spanked girls. She sat, the skirt halfway up her thighs. then shifted slightly. The skirt rode higher. Even a soft chair was reminding her that her bottom was sore, and the cool leather was contrasting with the heat of her bottom and upper thighs.

I was sure she’d remember that detail, perhaps tonight, one-handed and wet-fingered in bed. Lying on her stomach, I imagined her, bottom rising and falling while she gasped and moaned. Until she froze, arched, then moved again, spasmodically, as though she were being kicked. I wondered what her orgasm noise was like. I realised it was on my fucket-list: I wanted to hear that moan for myself.

I said, “So, Jennifer. You’ve been spanked for some very stupid behavior. Thinking you could get away with cutting classes. That was stupid. But you’re not stupid. So why? Do you like getting spanked?”

That was a dangerous question, pretending innocence. She pretended too. Mouth slightly open, eyes wide open, shaking her head. I repressed a smile.

I considered asking, “Are you sure?” To watch her denial some more. But the comedy was good as it was. “So that’s the skipping classes dealt with. Right?”

How often will both the teacher and the child be aroused during a “spanking”?

The 5% rule means there are likely to be 816 instances a year where both the teacher and the child are mutually aroused by the spanking experience they are sharing.

However, the true number is likely to be more than that. Because children who discover an arousing situation are liable to search it out – or make sure it happens – so they can experience it again.

It’s a great porn scenario, and it can be a fun role-play for those that role-play. But it belongs in fiction, not the real world. Love her specs, by the way.

Likewise, teachers choose who they beat. Only a small proportion of school children and young people in schools get beaten. Children selected for beatings tend to be from minority ethnic groups or to have a disability.

Also, they tend to be the vulnerable children.

They won’t be the children who have powerful, well-connected parents, but they will be the ones who have a single working parent, or parents who are highly unlikely to have the skills or the networks to challenge the authority of the school.

We also know that within those minority groups some children are likely to be singled out and repeatedly beaten. (That makes nonsense of one of the key supposed justifications of child-beating: that it has a “deterrent effect”.)

Some of the children will be repeatedly beaten because they are “badly behaved”. Beating a “badly behaved” child may sound like easier work than trying to find out what the problem is, but any teacher with any experience knows that hitting a child only means you have to hit them again, because it doesn’t change “bad behaviour”.

There can be multiple motivations in play. As we’ve noted, the children who are picked for repeated beatings are those whose parents are least able to do anything about it.

But there’s another issue. The priests and lay brothers (and others: this isn’t just a problem in religious schools) who raped children after beating them, selected their victims for powerless and “attractiveness”. A child who is in one of the vulnerable categories is therefor more likely to be beaten if he or she is perceived to be “pretty”.

There are also the children who have a nascent sexual response to their beating. This may be hard to explain to people who don’t include spanking in their sex lives. But the fact is that anyone who has spanked a few people of the sex or sexes they prefer knows when the spanking is working and their “victim” is turned on. It can be a subtle thing, a matter of a certain kind of silence and attention, of small body movements and so on during the spanking, and the abstracted emotional tone they have afterwards.

Teachers who have bdsm sensitivity will recognise those and similar signs. That child and that teacher, who is in denial about their own attraction to spanking, or is aware of it and unscrupulous, will meet again, and re-enact that ritual, in an odd form of erotic courtship and release.

This isn’t common. It’s somewhere over 0.25% of all school beatings. The odds are that it won’t any particular parent’s children who get caught up in that cruel and unfairly balanced erotic ritual, but it will be someone’s children.

Let’s take the United States. Beating children and young people in public schools is legal in 19 States. In those States, 272,000 children were beaten in public schools in 2004/05.

The number of actual beatings is much higher than that. One reason is that only some children get beaten, and they tend to get multiple beatings in the course of a year. The children who get beaten in the US tend to be disproportionately black or Hispanic, or to have a disability. Moreover, having been beaten once is a good predictor of getting beaten again. When the same child is beaten repeatedly, the statistics won’t record that. They only record that that child was beaten at least once.

I’m going to be very conservative, and add 5% to take into account the repeated beatings of one child. So that’s a conservative estimate of 285,600 beatings in public schools.

The paddle-happy private schools

On top of that you have the schools that aren’t in the public school system. Schools in the private school system tend to be in conservative areas, and overwhelmingly they are not racially integrated. Also overwhelmingly, they tend to be religiously conservative and very committed to the “duty” of beating children.

I have to admit that I thought this Simpson’s meme was funny, in context. But it also squicked me a little: there’s nothing funny about beating children

10 per cent of American schools are private schools, but actually, private schools are concentrated in the 19 States where “corporal punishment” is legal.

But I’m going to be conservative, again, and assume that they’re only 10% of the schools in the 19 “corporal punishment” states, although in reality they’re likely to be a lot more than that, in those States.

Records aren’t collected for those schools, but all sources agree that private schools carry out far more “corporal punishment” than public schools. So, again being extremely conservative, I’m going to factor in a rate that is only 5% higher than for public schools. That comes to 40,800 child beatings a year in private American schools.

So, taking all that into account, and having used estimates that are likely to substantially understate the true number, we have approximately 326,400 child beatings a year in American schools.

So how many bdsm-sensitive people are involved in school child-beatings?

Applying the 5% rule, that means that in about 16,320 of those cases the teacher or disciplinary officer concerned was turned on, or trying to avoid being turned on, by the “paddling” they were delivering.

By the way, in Texas it’s still legal for a male teacher to “paddle” a female student on her buttocks, and Texas has recently raised its school leaving age to 19.

I know beyond any doubt that if I did “paddle” a 19 year old girl’s ass while she bent over a chair, there would be no way in hell I could avoid reacting sexually to that situation. No matter how hard I tried not to. But I simply couldn’t and wouldn’t do it. It’s pretty much a form of rape.

Unfortunately, an adult such as a teacher can’t just be quietly, internally aroused, so that no one else will pick up on it. An aroused person releases pheromones, which are detected by others in their space, like the person being “paddled” by the aroused person. Even if it isn’t consciously noticed, that release tends to alter the other person’s (the child’s, in this case) interpretation of what’s going on, their reactions to it and their behaviour.

But what about the children?

Still applying the 5% rule, it means that in about 16,320 of those cases the child or young person is interpreting what’s happening sexually, and responding to it sexually.

The people who think, “if you do it hard, there won’t be a sexual reaction” simply don’t know anything about how bdsm works. The victim might be more hurt than turned on at the instant of each swat. But then they have a long time to think about the experience, relive it over and over, and slightly change the memory of it.

I’ve punished a reasonable number of submissive women, where the intention was to cause only pain and no pleasure. I’ve learned, therefore, that there is no amount of pain, especially delivered to the buttocks, that can’t be interpreted erotically. That’s especially so when there’s a formal ritual, and the victim is made to present their own body and cooperate. How much it hurts at the time has nothing to do with the body and mind’s reactions.

Total number of sexualised spankings in schools?

That’s a total of 32,640 child-beatings a year, in which either the teacher or the child is aware of the “spanking” as a sexual event.

If parents or law-makers are happy with that, then the parents are carelessly ill-advised about the welfare of their children, and the legislators, though they’re going along with public opinion in their States, are being dangerously irresponsible.

The Australian Sexual Health and Relations Surveys, 2002 and 2013, taken together, reached some 40,000 people, using random sampling. Among the questions those 40,000 people were asked were:

Have you participated in bdsm in the last year? and

Have you taken part in role-playing games, like teacher and naughty schoolgirl, n the last year?

Taking the results, and making some estimates, we find that 2% of the population took part in bdsm with a further about 8% taking part in sexual games that involve elements of “command and I will obey you”, and spanking. That looks like 10%.

However, we don’t know exactly how those role-players played their roles, and we don’t know if commands (i.e. dominance and submission), or spanking were involved in every one of those games. So to be on the conservative side, we’ll count about half of that response, or 4%.

Now, 4% playing sexual games with, “come here!”, and “you need a spanking, don’t you” elements, plus the 2% who took part in what they directly referred to as bdsm, should add up to 6%. However, about half of the bdsm group also said they’d taken part in role-playing games. To avoid double counting those people, we bring the total down to 5%.

Okay, it’s not a spanking, but it’s part of that Thing We Do. Folsom Street Fair, of course.

So that’s one in twenty of the population. That means that something that affects us, or is affected by us, can’t just be dismissed as a problem for a few isolated weirdos.

Also, and on a more cheerful note, it means our odds of meeting a compatible partner are a lot greater than many people have thought.

To put that in context, that means there are about twice as many of us as there are exclusive gays or lesbians. On the other hand, we’re out-numbered about two to one by bisexuals.

That means there are:

about 16 million of us weirdos in the United States

about 3.2 million of us in the UK

about 1,8 million of us in Canada

about 1.2 million of us in Australia

about 225 thousand of us in New Zealand

So we’re everywhere, as they used to say. But a hell of a lot of us seem to turn up in Folsom Street.

That’s a hell of a lot of people, isn’t it?

Even more encouragingly, over 60% of us are switches (I’m not, I’m afraid), so your odds of having a good evening with the right person are pretty good.

I’ve only applied the figure to Britain and its predominantly white former colonies, because there’s enough cultural similarity between those countries to make it reasonably safe to do so.

I could probably make a guesstimate for France, Germany and Italy too, but that’ll do for now.

Tomorrow’s Wicked Wednesday, so I’ll be posting something sexy.

But there are more stats on Thursday, considering this question: An adult and a child are turned on by a spanking: hey, what are the odds?

[Trigger warning: this post discusses and provides sources on the beating and rape of children in schools.]

How does beating children affect teachers? (an optimistic view)

Let’s assume that teachers are much like the rest of the population. So about 4-5% of them are aroused by “punishment” scenarios. That means that if they’re required by the terms of their employment to beat a child or young person, those teachers find themselves in a deeply creepy situation, through no fault of their own. That’s assuming that they’re good people.

If they refuse to perform beatings themselves, or to refer a child to be beaten, because they see it as a form of sexual abuse they’re at great risk of losing their job at that school. If they out themselves overtly, they lose their career. Otherwise, they hide, and occasionally take their part in the school’s child-beating rituals, with as much of their sensibility shut off as they can manage.

They will try not to be responsive to the sexual elements of what they’re doing. And if they’re very, very careful, the child might not be aware. That’s one in twenty to twenty-five teachers, because teachers are no different from the rest of us.

Parents who are happy with their child or someone else’s child being beaten by someone who correctly thinks of the beating scenario as a sexual one, are insane. But that’s the best-case scenario.

Why it’s worse than that

That was assuming that all teachers are good people, and are able to deal with their sexual responses ethically. However, we know from the Commissions of Enquiry into sexual abuse of children in Ireland, Australia and elsewhere, that’s not how it is in the real world.

The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is still hearing evidence on the rape of children in institutions that used beatings as a way to “punish” children.

At schools run by the Christian Brothers and other Catholic orders, the rape of boys and girls frequently happened after the teacher had whipped the child with a strap or cane. The children was almost always placed bending over a table, or over a piece of laundry equipment, so they they were in a receptive position sexually as well as for beating. Their buttocks were often bared.

Not every time but often, the children were anally or vaginally raped after being beaten.

The setting for the child-beating ritual also enabled these rapes. Generally beatings were carried out in buildings like laundries, some distance from the main buildings and play areas, so the children’s screams could not be heard. Some of those who were under this regime, now adults, gave evidence that if they complained of the rape, they would be taken back to the place by a different teacher, beaten again, and again raped.

This is harrowing, awful stuff. It can be found in the reports from the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Similar reports came from Ireland. It’s not surprising that the psychological toll on the officials who have to hear, record and transcribe this evidence is reportedly very high.

It’s possible that some of those teachers were corrupted by their school environments, but it’s more likely that most were already pedophiles who were prepared to sexually assault and rape. They would be sexually excited by the beating of children (not all of the children; they usually selected their victims and concentrated on them) under their care, and they would take advantage of the power to isolate and undress a child to commit rape.

Organised pedophile rings and the making of “corporal punishment” videos

Pedophiles who are prepared to commit sexual assault or rape tend to go for professions that offer access to children. So the proportion of teachers who find that so-called “corporal punishment” is both exciting in itself and provides an enabling setting for sexual assault and rape is going to be higher than in the general population. Even when screening processes are put in place.

I’m one of the only two people in my family who has never worked as a teacher. I have enormous respect for the profession and for the vast majority of its members. But “corporal punishment” is a cancer on the profession’s reputation.

The existence of organised rings of pedophiles who specialised in making and swapping child “corporal punishment” videos came to light in 2002, with the arrest of many members of a group calling itself “The Spanking Club”, which was centered around teachers, school volunteers and people in related professions. The group members made and exchanged videos showing the real, often severe, beatings of children.

Some of the videos featured the members’ own children, while others featured other people’s children. That “corporal punishment” in schools was legal and socially accepted made it easier for members of the group to access victims, and to persuade the children involved that their ordeal was “normal”, because adults are allowed to hit children.

Other such organised groups are reported from time to time. They are, literally, secretive criminal conspiracies. There is therefore no way of knowing how prevalent they are. However, it is possible to know that we shouldn’t, as a society, be enabling them.

“Corporal punishment” enables rape

It’s no surprise or paradox that the “corporal punishment” setting is one of the situations in which children in schools, especially authoritarian schools, are at most risk of of sexual assault or rape.

The harsh truth is that parents who advocate for or condone “corporal punishment” for their own children or those of others in schools are increasing the risk to children of being subjected to sexual exploitation, sexual assault or rape.

All humans have some ability to turn pain and submission, or the giving of pain and the taking of submission, into sex. It’s part of a genetic and behavioural pattern we share with the other homo or pan species.*

It’s got survival and genetic advantages. If you can turn fighting into fucking through a dominance/submission ritual, you’re less likely to get killed or damaged. And having an extra pathway for sex means you’re likely to have more sex and more partners, with better chances of passing on your genes.

There’s no such thing as “a bdsm gene”. But there seem to be a number of genes that in combination make certain people readier than others to perceive certain experiences as sexual and to respond accordingly.

Childhood spankings are about the most most blatant of those experiences.

The sexual triggers include being held close to an adult’s sexually mature body, and the way the over-the-knee spanking position places the child’s genitals in close proximity to the adult’s genitals.

The misconduct that provoked the spanking may have been exciting (and may have involved sexual exploration) so that the spanking becomes part of the same excitingly “naughty” experience.

When a child is forced to present his or her bottom (even if clothed) to an adult, as part of the spanking, the child can read this as an indication that this is a “rude” event, allowing them to feel sexual about it. Children are likely to experience an adult’s attention to their buttocks as sexual regardless of the adult’s perception or intentions.

About five per cent of children, or one in twenty, are particularly likely to do so.

That footnote

Hands across the genus: bonobo and human hand

* Humans, chimps and bonobos are all in the same genus. Their part of the genus is called “pan” while we’re the only member of the “homo” genus. Really we should be re-classified as “pan sapiens”, or they should be re-classified as “homo”. There are three reasons why this change hasn’t happened yet:

It’s historical. Just how closely they’re related to us wasn’t fully understood until the second half of the 20th century;

Human ego. We want to be unique, called “homo sapiens sapiens”, and not too obviously linked to our hairier brothers and sisters;

If we admitted how far the human species is from being unique, it’d drive all the creationists nuts, especially the US ones, and when science is under attack on all fronts that fight isn’t worth having.

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